The Courage All Around

Late-night honest

with myself

My boy shames me

The courage he shows

drumming at the Metro

Spare change pours in

Folded bills drifting like

snow covering his lap

Ten years old, first

sharing a buck

with a woman who asks,

then shooing her away

when she won’t stop

asking for more

He goes about his business,

a lionheart tending his

pride of intentions,

while I flinch at the work

before me, at stepping up

before you, at speaking my piece

But where he’s heading,

where heart and skill

and the company of others,

the company of you,

colleagues with an instinct

to be movement and reach

we can believe in,

that place, that thought, swells

my heart The world you will build

beckons and beguiles

and because the heart is

a complicated thing

I feel no shame here

I feel the courage all around 

I am tripping in plain sight. I write poems about survivors. Here's one:

Never Can Tell
She wakes and feels this past

lurking beside her,

the ghost that will not fall behind,

pummeling, insistent.

She wakes and prays,

whoever is there to hear,

get me through this day.

I’ll not ask for more.

She wakes and dresses

her bits of scattered self,

hauling scarred pieces

to proper places, endlessly preparing.

At the door, she checks for menace

in hallways, scanning streets

for fleshy threats and phantoms,

seeking her whom she always meant to be.

Out the door,

she strides ahead

as if fearless,

limitless and ready.

She arrives feeling

unreckoned power, feeling this day

pregnant with difference, this day

ready, perhaps, for what yesterday was not.

and here's another:

Applause Is Overrated
Of all the workouts,

this run down by the

river of our downbeat,

this stretching of the heart

muscle, this reaching for

who you were, for how you

are now, for the nature of your

next epiphany,

is only the beginning

of me here thinking about

you ready

to play

the game you find

yourself in now. This is how

you fill the outline of all you

meant to be,

willful and wilding,

a minute late and a step too far.

You get up, and you go,

you go girl, live this day

and fuck the

deafening silence.

But I am not the poet I wish to be. To be that poet, I would have to produce a poetry of survival that is also a poetry of joy in overcoming. Here's one such poem by Audre Lorde:

The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors
I did not fall from the sky
I
nor descend like a plague of locusts
to drink color and strength from the earth
and I do not come like rain
as a tribute or symbol for earth's becoming
I come as a woman dark and open
some times I fall like night 
softly
and terrible
only when I must die
in order to rise again.

I do not come like a secret warrior
with an unseated sword in my mouth
hidden behind my tongue
slicing my throat to ribbons
of service with a smile
while the blood runs
down and out
through holes in the two sacred mounds
on my chest.

I come like a woman
who I am
spreading out through nights
laughter and promise
and dark heat
warming whatever I touch
that is living
consuming
only
what is already dead.

I do try to be that poet, one who can write poems of survival that are also poems of joy in overcoming. Here's one of my attempts to do so:

Wild Once and Captured
On hearing Annie Lennox

A whisper full of rhythms,
an echo raw with power,
a people spilling outward
in tidal flows of fever.
Here music summons silence,

here longing a language,
touching an allure,
dancing a passion play
and searching leads us
one by one

to stories all our own,
and to stories told in common.
Here smolders spirit
rich and ripe with promise,
peace and legend.

There drums yammering in clearings
where we are jamming with justice
who was wild once
and captured
and has broken out again.

But to be that poet, the one I want to be, I would have to go beyond a poetry of survival that is also a poetry of joy in overcoming. It must also be a poetry of commitment and of grim determination. Here's one such poem by Marge Piercy that I've posted on Outdoor Poetry Season repeatedly:

Joy Road and Livernois 

My name was Pat. We used to read Poe in bed 

till we heard blood dripping in the closet.
I fell in love with a woman who could ring
all bells of my bones tolling, jangling.
But she in her cape and her Caddy
had to shine in the eyes of the other pimps,
a man among monkeys, so she turned me on the streets
to strut my meek ass. To quiet my wailing,
she taught me to slip the fire in my arm,
the white thunder rolling over till nothing
hurt but coming down. One day I didn’t.
I was fifteen. My face gleamed in the casket.

My name was Evie, we used to shoplift,
my giggling wide-eyed questions, your fast hands;
we picked up boys together on the corners.
The cops busted me for stealing, milled me,
sent me up for prostitution because I weren’t
no virgin. I met my boyfriend in the courts.
Together we robbed a liquor store that wouldn’t

sell us whiskey. I liked to tote a gun.
It was the cleanest thing I ever held.
It was the only power I ever had.
I could look any creep straight on in the eyes.
A state trooper blew my face off in Marquette.

My name was Peggy. Across the street from the gas-
works my mom raised nine kids. My brother-
in-law porked me while my sister gave birth,
choking me with the pillow when I screamed.
I got used to it. My third boyfriend knocked me up.
Now I’ve been pregnant for twenty years,
always a bigger belly than me to push around
like an overloaded wheelbarrow ready to spill
on the blacktop. Now it’s my last one,
a tumor big as a baby when they found it.
When I look in the mirror I see my mom.
Remember how we braided each other’s hair,
mine red, yours black. Now I am bald
as an egg and nearly boiled through.

I was Teresa. I used to carry a long clasp
knife I stole from my uncle. Running nights
through the twitching streets, I’d finger it.
It made me feel as mean as any man.
My boyfriend worked on cars until they flew.
All those hot night riding around and around
when we had no place to go but back.
Those nights we raced out on the highway
faster faster till the blood fizzed in my throat
like shaken soda. It shot in an arc
when he hit the pole and I went out the windshield,
the knife I showed you how to use still
on its leather thong between my breasts
where it didn’t save me from being cut in two.

I was Gladys. Like you, I stayed in school.
I did not lay down in back seats with boys.
I became a nurse, married, had three sons.
My ankles swelled. I worked the night hours
among the dying and accident cases. My husband
left me for a girl he met in a bar, left debts,
a five-year-old Chevy, a mortgage.
My oldest came home in a body bag. My youngest
ran off. The middle one drinks beer and watches
the soaps since the Kelsey-Hays plant closed.
Then my boy began to call me from the alley.
Every night he was out there calling, Mama,
help me. It hurts, Mama! Take me home.
This is the locked ward and the drugs
eat out my head like busy worms.

With each of them I lay down, my twelve-
year-old scrawny tough body like weathered
wood pressed to their pain, and we taught
each other love and pleasure and ourselves.
We invented the places, the sounds, the smells,
the little names. At twelve I was violent
in love, a fiery rat, a whip snake,
a starving weasel, all teeth and speed
except for the sore fruit of my new breasts
pushing out. What did I learn? To value
my pleasure and how little the love of women
can shield against the acid city rain.

You surge among my many ghosts. I never think
I got out because I was smart, brave, hard-
working, attractive. Evie was brave,
Gladys and Teresa were smart. Peggy worked
sixteen hours. Pat gleamed like olivewood
polished to a burnish as if fire lived in wood.
I wriggled through an opening left just big enough
for one. There is no virtue in survival,
only luck, and a streak of indifference
that I could take off and keep going.

I got out of those Detroit blocks where the air
eats stone and melts flesh, where jobs
dangle and you jump and jump, where there are
more drugs than books, more ways to die
than ways to live, because I ran fast,
ran hard, and never stopped looking back.
It is not looking back that turned me
to salt, no, I taste my salt from the mines
under Detroit, the salt of our common juices.
Girls who lacked everything except trouble,
contempt and rough times, girls
used like urinals, you are the salt
keeps me from rotting as the years swell.
I am the fast train you are travelling in
to a world of a different color, and the love
we cupped so clumsily in our hands to catch
rages and drives onward, an engine of light.

But ultimately I am no more or no less than the poet that I am. I'm not becoming something different--in fact, in some ways, I am always and repeatedly something different; a poet, like all poets, of mood, of reckless joy, of fading courage, of gifts that come and go, and sometimes mute, sometimes no poet, at all. Here's a poem from that poet:

The Last Night
Heart, moon, breath and secrets—

jackpot of life and greater than rubies

for a silk-gowned queen—

invested long ago in goddesses and mysteries,

stories and familiars.

Infrequently, a god on this theory:

If one falls likely another will rise.

So jewel by jewel dropped or planted

like magic beans in wetlands

or in pools of courage

or in an eternity of fingertips

or in tears of fathers

as heart and moon,

breath and secrets.

Tumbling, reflecting,

life, joyful and ferocious

this heart splashes down,

sinking to the depths of Diana,

my fantastic huntress across eons

and cultures light years of difference

and no further apart than the space

between humans; which is to say,

sometimes no space, at all,

and sometimes like the deaf

speaking in lost tongues.

She is elegant in silk,

delicate in sheer,

fierce and opaque like darkness

at the end of life

trialing the tigress.

Oh, my incomparable beauty,

here to love every soul willing to love back.

And moon falls next to mysteries deep,

becomes this angel, David,

who also loves the young or old,

the robust and the waiting,

and gifts them with wild yearning 

for his touch,

and trades one for another

and another, until yearning becomes us all,

and the job is done.

Oh, my sweet, isn’t this a terrible delight,

the way the swamp gasses glow,

the way breath in aerosol gasps

becomes clouds of trilling vapor?

Stutter, speak, desperately sing then,

relying on voice and sorcery.

start and stop and start again until,

unhalted, shout savage, melodious joy,

defy the bully thunder,

contest the wild’s winking rumors,

confront its sly cunning.

Oh, finally,

my writhing, ecstatic secrets go further,

go firmer, go longer, go sunset to sunrise,

go sunrise to sunset, glow incandescently,

as if to banish trailing shadows,

as the dark of which we spoke

galloped after the huntress.

And next the tomcat rode

behind the young, infatuated witch.

What a story that one will be,

but this end arrives, leaving nothing

for now to say and surprise

that glory would last so long.

I’d bow but for the stiffness

overtaking my once moist and fertile self.

Still, my thanks.

You’ve been great.

You are great.

You and me talking Congo, gender, grief and ash

So, Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. Less than a week ago that hard reality landed on us with great weight and searing heat and withering cold. We are bereft. We struggle to make sense of it, but we find the fact of his victory so alienating that it leaves us isolated from each other. We wake in the dark fearful, afraid of the coming devastation. We cry unexpectedly. Trump's racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic campaign makes us wonder if we are safe, makes us wonder what has become of our allies. How much have we deceived ourselves and others about our world and our efforts to make it better?

Poetry may not be the answer, but it is one of them.


For Alice Walker
(a summertime tanka)

June Jordan

Redwood grove and war
You and me talking Congo
gender grief and ash

I say, 'God! It's all so huge'
You say, 'These sweet trees. This tree.'


from Poetry As Insurgent Art

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am signaling you through the flames
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.
Civilization self-destructs. Nemesis is knocking at the door.
What are poets for in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?


Too

Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.


Night In The Kitchen

Adrienne Rich

The refrigerator falls silent.
Then other things are audible:
this dull, sheet-metal mind rattling like stage thunder.
This thickness budging forward in these veins
is surely something other
than blood:
say, molten lava.

You will become a black lace cliff fronting a deadpan sea;
nerves, friable as lightning
ending in burnt pine forests.
You are begun, beginning, your black heart drumming
slowly, triumphantly
inside its pacific cave.




Wild Once and Captured
On hearing Annie Lennox

Jeff Epton

A whisper full of rhythms,
an echo raw with power,
a people spilling outward
in tidal flows of fever.
Here music summons silence,

here longing a language,
touching an allure,
dancing a passion play
and searching leads us
one by one

to stories all our own,
and to stories told in common.
Here smolders spirit
rich and ripe with promise,
peace and legend.

There drums yammering in clearings
where we are jamming with justice
who was wild once
and captured
and has broken out again.

Joy Road and Livernois

Marge Piercy 

My name was Pat. We used to read Poe in bed
till we heard blood dripping in the closet.
I fell in love with a woman who could ring
all bells of my bones tolling, jangling.
But she in her cape and her Caddy
had to shine in the eyes of the other pimps,
a man among monkeys, so she turned me on the streets
to strut my meek ass. To quiet my wailing,
she taught me to slip the fire in my arm,
the white thunder rolling over till nothing
hurt but coming down. One day I didn’t.
I was fifteen. My face gleamed in the casket.

My name was Evie, we used to shoplift,
my giggling wide-eyed questions, your fast hands;
we picked up boys together on the corners.
The cops busted me for stealing, milled me,
sent me up for prostitution because I weren’t
no virgin. I met my boyfriend in the courts.
Together we robbed a liquor store that wouldn’t

sell us whiskey. I liked to tote a gun.
It was the cleanest thing I ever held.
It was the only power I ever had.
I could look any creep straight on in the eyes.
A state trooper blew my face off in Marquette.

My name was Peggy. Across the street from the gas-
works my mom raised nine kids. My brother-
in-law porked me while my sister gave birth,
choking me with the pillow when I screamed.
I got used to it. My third boyfriend knocked me up.
Now I’ve been pregnant for twenty years,
always a bigger belly than me to push around
like an overloaded wheelbarrow ready to spill
on the blacktop. Now it’s my last one,
a tumor big as a baby when they found it.
When I look in the mirror I see my mom.
Remember how we braided each other’s hair,
mine red, yours black. Now I am bald
as an egg and nearly boiled through.

I was Teresa. I used to carry a long clasp
knife I stole from my uncle. Running nights
through the twitching streets, I’d finger it.
It made me feel as mean as any man.
My boyfriend worked on cars until they flew.
All those hot night riding around and around
when we had no place to go but back.
Those nights we raced out on the highway
faster faster till the blood fizzed in my throat
like shaken soda. It shot in an arc
when he hit the pole and I went out the windshield,
the knife I showed you how to use still
on its leather thong between my breasts
where it didn’t save me from being cut in two.

I was Gladys. Like you, I stayed in school.
I did not lay down in back seats with boys.
I became a nurse, married, had three sons.
My ankles swelled. I worked the night hours
among the dying and accident cases. My husband
left me for a girl he met in a bar, left debts,
a five-year-old Chevy, a mortgage.
My oldest came home in a body bag. My youngest
ran off. The middle one drinks beer and watches
the soaps since the Kelsey-Hays plant closed.
Then my boy began to call me from the alley.
Every night he was out there calling, Mama,
help me. It hurts, Mama! Take me home.
This is the locked ward and the drugs
eat out my head like busy worms.

With each of them I lay down, my twelve-
year-old scrawny tough body like weathered
wood pressed to their pain, and we taught
each other love and pleasure and ourselves.
We invented the places, the sounds, the smells,
the little names. At twelve I was violent
in love, a fiery rat, a whip snake,
a starving weasel, all teeth and speed
except for the sore fruit of my new breasts
pushing out. What did I learn? To value
my pleasure and how little the love of women
can shield against the acid city rain.

You surge among my many ghosts. I never think
I got out because I was smart, brave, hard-
working, attractive. Evie was brave,
Gladys and Teresa were smart. Peggy worked
sixteen hours. Pat gleamed like olivewood
polished to a burnish as if fire lived in wood.
I wriggled through an opening left just big enough
for one. There is no virtue in survival,
only luck, and a streak of indifference
that I could take off and keep going.

I got out of those Detroit blocks where the air
eats stone and melts flesh, where jobs
dangle and you jump and jump, where there are
more drugs than books, more ways to die
than ways to live, because I ran fast,
ran hard, and never stopped looking back.
It is not looking back that turned me
to salt, no, I taste my salt from the mines
under Detroit, the salt of our common juices.
Girls who lacked everything except trouble,
contempt and rough times, girls
used like urinals, you are the salt
keeps me from rotting as the years swell.
I am the fast train you are travelling in
to a world of a different color, and the love
we cupped so clumsily in our hands to catch
rages and drives onward, an engine of light.

Arcing and the Universe

Don’t say there’s no thump,

no whomp, no beat beat beat,

no rustle and thrill in

silence…

Don’t say there’s no thump,

no whomp,

no beat beat beat,

no whisper rolling in…

We started

what we started,

got to where we got,

still hearing thump and whomp and beat beat beat…

Don’t say that you can’t hear it,

the whomping and the beating,

the heaving and the dancing

of others moving on…

There’s beat beat beat,

the rustle and thrill

and dancing feet

and tidal pull of folk and moon…

Folk are striding striding long

and pushing hard,

feet are dancing

hands are pulling…

All the loving,

all the sharing,

the rustle and thrill of catching on,

the folk and pull

and voices calling

and standing standing standing tall

and heart just beating

beating heart beat beat…

Wild Once and Captured

On hearing Annie Lennox

A whisper full of rhythms,

an echo raw with power,

a people spilling outward

in tidal flows of fever.

Here music summons silence,

here longing a language,

touching an allure,

dancing a passion play

and searching leads us

one by one

to stories all our own,

and to stories told in common.

Here smolders spirit

ripe with promise,

rich with peace and legendary reach.

There drums yammering in clearings

where we are jamming with justice

who was wild once

and captured

and has broken out again.

Three poems from Wild Once and Captured

These three poems can be found in my book, Wild Once and Captured, which is available on-line at the Teaching for Change webstore.

Depends on who you ask

Of course,

we still believe in magic,

a science of a different sort.

And our science tells us

what we have been feeling

for longer than we care to say.

Our time,

the way we used to be,

is up.

We were the light-footed imps

who danced away from the fate

that fell on dinosaurs.

But the time of our agility,

our reverently imagined beauty,

is over. Ended.

We are the ponderous

of our end of days,

industrialized humans,

lethal consumers

at the top of the chain

as we know it.

But before we ask ourselves

how to recover our dancing feet

with dancing shoes,

we have a duty

to ask

on behalf of all our victims

if they wish for more from us,

if their dreams of us

are nightmares.

Never Can Tell

She wakes and feels this past

lurking beside her,

the ghost that will not fall behind,

pummeling, insistent.

She wakes and prays,

whoever is there to hear,

get me through this day.

I’ll not ask for more.

She wakes and dresses

her bits of scattered self,

hauling scarred pieces

to proper places, endlessly preparing.

At the door, she checks for menace

in hallways, scanning streets

for fleshy threats and phantoms,

seeking her whom she always meant to be.

Out the door,

she strides ahead

as if fearless,

limitless and ready.

She arrives feeling

unreckoned power, feeling this day

pregnant with difference, this day

ready, perhaps, for what yesterday was not.

Wild Dogs of Poets

The wild dogs of poets

speak sharps and blunts,

wish the streets

to the back alleys

of emerald cities;

some singing separately

and, alive for now,

glow in the dusky,

dreaming sky,

some scratch for pennies

where there are no such

generosities. Some kill time

as though they are flush,

and some few, the chosen, die

on the barricades, hopeful and ready.

I Am Your Journeyman

I am no poet of the

   interior voyage.

But I am a journeyman,

   giving good effort

for wages or food.

I know the paths

    through caves and forests.

I know the edible fruit

    along the way.

I’ll show you the shallow fords

   across the river of tears.

Follow me

    picking the way through the woods

on black days. Heed this moonlight

    exalting the heart even through

this night of fear.

Caution now,

    there may be need for stealth.

Keep pace.

Keep close.

Keep faith.

Savor this good bread,

    considering without regret

the choices you have made.

We’ll arrive safely soon enough,

    resting on Thursday,

moving on, refreshed, on Friday.

    Along the way,

we’ll learn more trust,

   celebrating dews and frosts and thunder.

(This poem was included in Wild Once and Captured)

Boys and Men

Sinewy dreams,

blinding lights,

boys flexing, pulsing,

bragging, ambitious with life.

Men seeking shares of day,

shares of night.

Dreams of boys and men

carry me through dip and lift

to lands where

boys like men like me

bound and soar on good days,

and on bad days struggle

to stand straight

and still.

June Jordan

For Alice Walker (a summertime tanka)

Redwood grove and war
You and me talking
gender grief and ash

I say, 'God! It's all so huge'
You say, 'These sweet trees: This tree'

June Jordan's simple poem about a walk she took with Alice Walker is poignant and important. The poem gets where it's going without pretension and with a very big heart. It makes me want to be a better poet. And the poem seems like evidence that poetry can capture and express complicated feelings, evidence that I can share with people, including friends, who say they don't 'get' poetry.

Those are the two main reasons why I used For Alice Walker to introduce a section in my book Wild Once and Captured. Because I wanted to associate myself with a real poet and I wanted people who don't read poetry to think that it really can speak to them, about them, and, even, on their behalf.

I used to read Jordan's columns when she was a regular contributor to The Progressive. She was a powerful writer and an acute political thinker, though not always a subtle one. Like, here, for instance:

"Into that infamous Tuesday inferno of fire and structural collapse, a humbling number of men and women fell to a horrifying death. And now the rest of us remain, stricken by fear, stricken by grief.
We have become a wilderness of jeopardized loved ones, and terrifying strangers," Jordan wrote during the buildup to war that began so suddenly in the weeks after planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

I sometimes thought her writing poetic, but I rarely thought of her as a poet. I would read her columns and move on, almost always affected, sometimes greatly moved. I can't help thinking that she affected me so often and so strongly because she was a poet, whether or not I was aware of that condition.

On an unnumbered page at the very beginning of Naming Our Destiny, a collection of her poems, there are 16 lines, untitled, that put me in mind of magic and great mystery, and of Jordan's occasional mastery of those things:

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
They are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become.

In the book the lines are italicized, but the rest of her poems are not; maybe to make those lines feel more conversational, maybe just to make me pay more attention. And I do pay attention...I mean, I am...I mean, I will...but when Jordan says she is "reaching for you, whoever you are," I start thinking about a similar set of lines from Walt Whitman:

Whoever you are
now I place my hand upon you
that you be
my poem

I love that Whitman and Jordan (both of whom frequently announced that they were "an American") reach out with "desperate arms" and lay their hands on us with such abandon. I give my absolute consent to Whitman and Jordan both. Come ahead, feel me, and let your touch linger.

The truth is, Jordan thinks about such things all the time:

Meta-Rhetoric

Homophobia
racism
self-definition
revolutionary struggle

the subject tonight for
public discussion is
our love

we sit apart
apparently at opposite ends of a line
and I feel the distance
between my eyes
between my legs
a dry
dust topography of our separation

In the meantime people
dispute the probabilities
of union

They reminisce about the chasmic histories
no ideology yet dares to surmount

I disagree with you
You disagree with me
The problem seems to be a matter of scale

Can you give me the statistical dimensions
of your mouth on my mouth
your breasts resting on my own?

I believe the agenda involves
several inches (at least)
of coincidence and endless recovery

My hope is that our lives will declare
this meeting open

Jordan's poems sometimes count the dead in places like Soweto and Nicaragua and Mississippi. Rape, each time it happens, occurs over and over again, because Jordan feels each rape as though it happened to her and, she wants us to understand, it happens to the rest of us, too.

When a woman was gang raped in a notorious incident in New Bedford, Mass., Jordan felt it:

This is a promise I am making
it here
legs spread on the pool
table of New Bedford

she wrote in Poem on the Road, for Alice Walker.

The complete poem is so full of Jordan's anguish and rage, it keeps breaking rhythm and building a new one and breaking it again. It's like Jordan can hardly talk and hardly stop talking.

June Jordan puts me in mind of Walt Whitman a lot, except she never pretends to a booming pride. But around the two of them, you never know when sex might break out, or wounds might begin to bleed, or compassion well up.

June Jordan was so fierce and so loving and so passionate about the blood that flows in all of us that
we risk terrible loss if we forget her, or never know her. She's still out there for the knowing.

Ecstasy

In this moment,

the world around is a perfect space.

The hot point inside you

and the cold point there

balance the hot and cold

the whole universe around.

In this moment,

you rip loose, run

naked, unshod,

down streets and alleys,

toe and heel transforming asphalt

to sea foam, soothing your soul.

In this moment,

you stride this way,

whip arms swinging,

shoulders like easy oil,

greasing and flinging you

through damp and distance.

The darkness divides for you,

wayfarer,

long strider stampeding by,

bearing secrets.

Like racehorses and hound dogs,

nostrils grasping and snatching

your own scent, the moist surround,

all the exuberant plants of the night.

You are hailed,

summoned

and called

to this exquisite place.

When I love you

There is fool’s gold
in myself absorbed.
Frailty
in myself reflected,

in myself,
at whom I stare, rushed
and passionate and finally frozen.
Such futility in this self,

absorbed and dreaming. But there is relief
in the heart of outcasts, relief
in outcasts who have learned to love,
relief in leaving the dreamer behind.

Ambition was the measure of the gap
between reality and me,
dreaming through the distance
I had wandered.

Voice is the sound of me
arrived this day.
And the rich, bloody wave cresting in my chest,
that wave is my dying wish.

Until then, that we have separate rhythms,
that you inspect,
that you see far,
that you give chase,

that you sweat a different blood
is a joy and a bridge.
I am sane when I love you
and love others.

When I bathe in your laughter,
when I linger in your sight,
when we rest in each other’s prayer,
I am safely here.
(And you with me.)

Jezebel

...is included in my book, Wild Once and Captured, available here, on the website of Teaching for Change.

Jezebel

You know when we met

I was a girl who loved

Baal for his rain and sweet water

and might love you for your youth and sweet breath.

I was the lure brought you unknowing

to Siddon where the sun skied mornings

above cedar hills, making jewels

on the crest of harbor swells.

Jezebel, chief’s daughter,

dreaming of many things,

but most often of the boy

to make my thighs quiver,

and none of the queen who later

would make my eyes run wet and salty.

You, pale desert boy, came,

hooked by my dreams,

with hair like raven’s wings

and prophet’s dreams of glory

and torturer’s dreams of pain

and a core of discontent

that you were born a shepherd.

I would have left my father’s hearth

to be your shepherdess, but for

your claim to something greater.

Our joyful dance pleased Baal, I know,

while you pretended grim shame before your god

who punished you like an angry father,

whom you yet embraced.

Were we to approach the other now,

would you wet your lips for this sweet Phoenician,

or would I be target for your rage

and angry accusations?

Do your loins remember

my dewy hills at dawn,

the little rivers of our wet fertility

dampening chest and thigh and mysteries?

Or would you pretend to a purity

that never pricked a gentile?

I am reconciled that I did not defy my father,

fight Ethbaal to love my Israelite shepherd boy.

 But I tried and tried

to come to you and cried,

Eli, your Jessie has come,

when I arrived, but there was no answer.

Had you waited for me? And misunderstood

my absence? Cursed me for rejecting you,

as you curse me now for turning

from the worship of your god

who demands more than other gods?

Now, Ethbaal is king in Tyre

and I am queen in Samaria

and spread my legs for Ahab,

the Israelite king, whom you daily damn.

I am thus, Queen Jezebel,

the living bond between Israel and Phoenicia,

which you condemn,

somehow forgetting the beauty

of Eli and Jessie,

as your one god does dismiss

the beauties of the many.

Your own voice,

which once whispered

sweetness in the courtyard

of the temple of Baal and laughed

in the sight of the sky goddess, Lady Nut,

your voice thunders and threatens,

slanders innocence, proclaims

dominion for one god above all gods,

                                                

dismissing dancing and worship before many.

My Eli, sweet tormented shepherd,

it is not our gods who invent unkindness,

but ourselves. This your lord, God, must know,

though you shrill otherwise,

and speak of a god blind to

the pools of kindness and courage

in foreign worshippers. How like the way

you deny the pool of love in which

we bathed and sung praise.

Do you remember the hart at sunrise

leaping our prostrate bodies?

I crept the shadows before that dawn

and startled when you arrived beside me.

And when you opened your robe,

I stepped inside your arms and

warm wrap of cotton while we sank

to earth, your lips sweet on mine,

your tongue a spring of wild water

plunging to my thirsty roots.

We moved slowly to the late calls of night birds,

quickening even as the owls hooted

slow caution, finishing to the sound

of hooves pounding, the hart

robust and wild above us and gone.

In the peace we found, I swear I heard

the great heart beating and felt the

throbbing pulse below,

just as it might have been

on the glorious first day.

I said the gods are smiling and you looked

at me and I said you are

smiling, too, and you said, this time, yes.

Do you have memory of this, or none?

Just as your god of many promises

remembers only those he wishes to keep?

Do you remember only that

which serves you now?

Are you now a perfect

acolyte of your god?

In your zeal you are become a destroyer,

first of earthly desire, and more besides.

Your wish to sip the wines of a hundred kingdoms

forgotten, your wish to sample the women

of every prince of every port

of the wide Phoenician sea,

lost. Gone as though left undreamt.

Or shriven within your heart,

consumed in the desert heat

of a different passion, your

service to your one god, who

requires devotion not in me to give.

You denounce Ahab, whom you call

the willing tool

of the prostitute of Tyre.

But Ahab leads as kings do.

 I stand not in his way. Ahab

ministers to the myriads

who worship whomever they will.

Ministers to the myriads who toil,

wear down like rocks in the stream,

who suffer hardship of drought,

and locust plagues,

and children born still

and children died young

and lovers claimed too soon. It is Ahab

who keeps the granaries full against famine,

Ahab who cares for the widow,

soothes the orphan,

Ahab who decrees no favorite

among the gods, who does not choose

among the gods

of Israelites, Ammonites, Edomites and Moabites.

And his people praise Ahab’s forbearance,

thank Ahab for his kindness,

while you call Ahab sinner.

In the King’s court, I have stood for

sandalmakers from Ammom,

stood for potters from Moab, saying to the King

these, also, are your people,

there should be no special privilege

for the Jews.

And the King has listened, then ruled as he would.

Ahab is no tool of Jezebel.

But Elijah Hanavi tells the story,

Jezebel the prostitute from Phoenicia

twists Ahab’s judgment and sins against

the one god.

And who listens?

The Hebrew zealots listen, and the hopeless,

aching for legends of more and better, listen,

and those who already bear hatred,

they listen. These have never seen the sea,

or the natural beauty of Phoenicia’s hills,

or the works of other men in Tyre. You

have made cause with these men

whose hard lives will change only as Ahab succeeds,

but the gifts of milk and honey they are promised

are the empty bribes of an intolerant god.

Who will protect Israel from Assyria?

 The lord, your god, has no chariots.

Ahab’s soldiers, Ammomites, Edomites,

Israelites, Moabites, these are Israel’s shield.

The soldiers of a kingdom of many customs and many faiths,

these will protect Israel,

as will Ahab, the king, whom you damn.

You have riled the Hebrews.

Enough riot through Samaria and all of Israel

 to kill all the priests of Baal. Now you flee to the Judean hills,

and claim that Jezebel sends vengeance racing after.

But it is I who remain behind.

I who calm Ahab,

Ahab who wishes to decree your death.

Seek no vengeance, I say to Ahab.

Only bring Elijah to explain this deed

in your court. But, yes, Eli, I also urged

Ahab on, saying hunt Hanavi,

he must answer to the families

of the lovers of other gods.

Yet I am split in pieces.

I am Ahab’s queen.

I am the princess who was Eli’s love.

I am the tears that Jessie cried

to the sun that rose in Eli’s face

in his wandering east.

I am those tears springing fresh today

from Jezebel’s eyes.

I hear, Eli, I am to die in the street,

torn to pieces by hungry dogs.

Is this your curse? Does Elijah triumph here?

Will the story of Jezebel and Ahab be told

according to Elijah?

And what  will be the fruit that grows

from such stories?

Shepherd boy, know this,

Jessie will not flee the lies and sordid tales.

I am a chief’s daughter, Queen of Israel.

What you decree, may come, but Jezebel does not flee.

I remember you once had such a will

when we loved a lifetime ago.